A pharmaceutical company could save $5 million by skipping a safety test, with an estimated 1-in-10,000 chance of causing one death. A classical utilitarian analysis of this decision requires:
APrioritizing the company's welfare since corporations count as persons in modern law
BWeighing the expected utility of the financial gain against the expected disutility of harm to all affected parties, including the potential victim, with equal weight
CDeferring to individual autonomy — consumers can choose whether to take the risk
DRejecting the cost-benefit framing as a category error in ethical reasoning
Classical utilitarianism requires aggregating utility across all affected parties with impartiality — the company's profit counts, but so does the potential victim's welfare, counted equally. The correct utilitarian analysis compares expected benefits to expected harms across everyone affected. Option A violates impartiality (companies don't get privileged standing); option C smuggles in autonomy-based reasoning foreign to classical utilitarianism; option D rejects the consequentialist framework entirely.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
The 'organ harvesting' thought experiment — killing one healthy patient to save five dying ones — is a challenge to utilitarianism because:
AIt shows utilitarianism cannot handle cases involving more than two people
BThe utilitarian calculus appears to endorse killing an innocent person to maximize aggregate welfare, which conflicts with the intuition that individuals have rights that cannot be violated even for the greater good
CUtilitarianism cannot calculate the utility of dying patients accurately
DMill explicitly argued that organ harvesting is always impermissible under higher pleasures
The organ harvesting case is designed to reveal a structural tension: if utilitarianism requires maximizing total utility, and five lives saved produces more utility than one life preserved, the calculus seems to endorse the killing. This conflicts with the near-universal intuition that individuals have rights that function as side-constraints — things you cannot do to them even for aggregate benefit. Most utilitarians respond with rule utilitarianism or indirect arguments, but the tension is genuine and is the point of the thought experiment.
Question 3 True / False
According to utilitarian theory, your own suffering deserves equal moral weight to the suffering of a complete stranger.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Impartiality is one of utilitarianism's most demanding and most important features. When summing utility across affected parties, every person's welfare enters the calculation with equal weight — your own suffering is not privileged over a stranger's, and a stranger's is not more important than yours. This is what distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism (maximize your own welfare) and from partial theories that give special weight to family or community. The common misconception is that utilitarianism is about maximizing your own happiness — it is not.
Question 4 True / False
Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures solves the problem of utilitarianism by showing that intellectual and moral pleasures typically outweigh physical pleasures in utilitarian calculations.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Mill's distinction introduces a qualitative criterion — experienced judges who have tried both prefer higher pleasures — but it does not make higher pleasures automatically outweigh lower ones in all calculations. It complicates, rather than solves, the utilitarian framework by adding a criterion (the preferences of competent judges) that goes beyond simple pleasure measurement. Furthermore, the distinction introduces its own problems: it depends on who counts as a competent judge and whether their preferences are themselves utility-maximizing.
Question 5 Short Answer
What is Derek Parfit's 'repugnant conclusion,' and what does it reveal about classical utilitarianism as an ethical theory?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: The repugnant conclusion is the result that classical utilitarianism favors a world with a vast population of people whose lives are barely worth living over a smaller world of flourishing people, as long as the total sum of utility is higher. It reveals that the aggregative, impartial structure of classical utilitarianism generates counterintuitive verdicts in population ethics — specifically, that adding people with marginally positive lives always increases total utility, even if it dilutes average welfare enormously.
Parfit's conclusion is not a mere curiosity — it exposes a structural feature of any theory that maximizes total welfare without regard to distribution or average. The result seems clearly wrong to most people: a world of billions barely scraping by seems worse than a smaller, flourishing civilization. Yet classical utilitarianism is committed to it. Responses include switching to average utilitarianism (maximize average, not total welfare) or adopting a critical level for what counts as a life worth adding. Each response generates new counterintuitive results, showing how deep the problem runs.